


no one thing is everything

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Established Relationship, Friendship, If You Squint - Freeform, Jody Mills finds out about Sam/Dean, M/M, Minor Donna Hanscum/Jody Mills, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Relationship Reveal, Sam Winchester is Loved, The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27958988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: Text from: JodyMorning, sunshine. Diner on Main & 2nd, meet me for breakfast? I want to talk to you about something, tell Dean I have some super boring ancient mythology crap to go over with you.Set sometime in the years between 15.19 and 15.20. Small spoilers for "Inherit the Earth" but none at all for "Carry On".
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Jody Mills & Sam Winchester, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 144
Collections: 2020 Supernatural & CWRPF Holiday Exchange





	no one thing is everything

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verucasalt123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verucasalt123/gifts).



> Many thanks to Stardust Made for being the best beta and best friend a person could hope for ♥
> 
> Much gratitude also to the mods for running this holiday exchange!
> 
> And of course all my love goes out to Jared and Jensen and the entire Supernatural family for giving us so much over the last 15 years.

> Text from: Jody
> 
> Morning, sunshine. Diner on Main & 2nd, meet me for breakfast? I want to talk to you about something, tell Dean I have some super boring ancient mythology crap to go over with you.

Sam reads the message through one half-open eye, cursing himself for not turning the sound off on his phone the night before. Every muscle in his body makes itself known – and loudly reminds him that he’s not in his twenties or even his thirties anymore – as he rolls onto his back.

Automatically he glances to his right, seeking out Dean on the other bed before he even knows what he’s looking for, and huffs a laugh when his brain catches up to his eyes. His brother is on his stomach, arms wrapped around his pillow and his face half-buried in it – it’s a mystery he hasn’t suffocated himself years ago, sleeping like that – and he is _out_. Attuned to Sam even in his sleep, Dean rarely wakes up when Sam moves around unless something’s wrong. Or unless they’re sharing the bed. Which they don’t often do when they’re away from the bunker, neither of them having much by way of desire to wake up in the middle of the night squashed together in the sagging center of a crummy motel king.

Sam yawns, then shivers when his feet hit the floor, stretching his arms over his head and suppressing a groan as his vertebrae start to realign. He takes his phone into the bathroom, reading Jody’s message again as he brushes his teeth. It’s barely seven AM, they all parted ways like six hours ago covered in soot and grave dirt, and Sam considers for a minute crawling back into bed – or into Dean’s bed and screw his grumbling about Sam’s octopus arms – and pretending he didn’t see the text. But by the time he’s finished with his teeth and uses the toilet he’s grown curious about what Jody could want to talk to him about alone. He texts her that he’s on his way, shimmies into his semi-clean pair of jeans and drops a note for Dean on the bedside table. _Meeting J for breakfast, text me if you want anything_.

The Impala is parked right by the window and unlike Sam’s quiet shuffling the sound of her engine would bring Dean out of a deeper sleep than this one, so Sam just pockets one of the room keys and slips out the door, walking a mile or so until he hits the town’s one-stoplight road. A minute later he spots the diner, Jody already seated in a booth by the front window. Sam waves to her, then holds the door for a big family just spilling out onto the sidewalk after their Sunday breakfast, all of them dressed up like they’re heading off to church which, Sam checks his watch, they probably are. He smiles at the gawky twenty-something boy who gives him an adorable double-take, and it’s not the first time he’s caught himself proving the rule of couples starting to act like each other because he follows it up with a wink, flustering the poor kid further. Shaking his head at himself, Sam waits for Grandpa to shamble out through the door and then ducks in, stooping to kiss Jody’s cheek before dropping down across from her.

===

_8 hours earlier_

“Done,” Jody’s voice carried over the sound of his shovel slamming into yet another layer of hard-packed gravel. The impact jarred his whole body and he swore loudly. “Woah, language, Winchester,” Jody laughed, leaning over the grave to pat him on the shoulder. 

Sam winced and leaned on his shovel, looking up at her. The camping lantern he’d placed to light his work made her face look eerily shadowed. “Incantation?” he asked, too tired to spell out his whole question. But awesomely, over the past however-many years, Jody had become pretty fluent in Winchesterisms. Earlier that evening he’d shouted her name and she’d dropped like a stone, clearing him for the kill shot. Dragging the corpse out of the woods had given him time to think about it, and he’d found himself pretty bowled over to realize there was no one else still in their lives they’d hunted with as often; no one outside of Dean who knew him as well.

She nodded now, swiping the back of her wrist over her forehead, leaving a sooty streak. “Bones turned blue and glow-y, just like they were supposed to. Now we just need the eight-foot grave and the burial herbs.”

“Yeah.” Sam pushed himself upright with a grunt. “Working on that.”

Jody turned and made off in the direction of her truck. A minute later Sam heard the pop of a bottle top, nearly hidden under a loud groan and the sound of Dean dropping down to sprawl in the grass a few feet away. 

Sam chipped at the gravel half-heartedly another couple times before glaring at Dean through the gloom. “You wouldn’t want to, I don’t know, help or anything, would you?”

Dean took a long pull off his beer and shook his head. “That wouldn’t be my first choice, no.”

“Fine.” Sam spread his arms in mock-defeat. “But I’m just saying, if I get blisters all over my palms, I’m not the one who’s gonna be complaining that I can’t use my hands.”

Dean barked a laugh, tilting his head back and then lifting his beer in a toast. “Good one. And a fair point, too, but I have a better one.”

“Oh yeah?” Sam drove his shovel into the ground again. “And what’s that?”

“Well, Samuel, it’s just that I _kinda_ like the view from right here.”

Sam looked over his shoulder at his brother and then quickly straightened up as Dean, deliberately slow to raise his eyes from Sam’s ass, waggled his eyebrows, looking mighty pleased with himself. 

Sam opened his mouth to reply in kind but a flash of light drew his eyes to the side. Jody, standing much closer than Sam had thought she was — definitely close enough to have overheard them — but her eyes were fixed down on her phone, the source of the light that’d drawn his attention, and she didn’t seem to be listening. 

“Dude,” Sam muttered, voice pitched low enough that only Dean could have heard him as he drove his shovel into the dirt again, and nodded towards Jody. Dean grimaced and shrugged, then got up in what Sam recognized as a non-verbal apology as he picked up the extra shovel to help Sam dig.

It took almost another hour to break through the rock and gravel to get a hole deep enough to bind the bones so that they wouldn’t rise again next full moon. The three of them took turns digging and feeding the ritual fire, keeping the bones glowing an eerie, brilliant blue. They worked mostly in silence, not a lot of breath left for conversation, which Sam was quietly grateful for. It threw him off his game when he stopped to think about how easily he and Dean had slipped into the habit of not checking themselves around other people. They’d decided ages ago that they didn’t care who saw what when they were out together; they were already used to acting unrelated when they were posing as agents or whatever for a case so it didn’t feel too weird that, even on the rare occasions they gave their real names, Dean now left the words ‘my brother’ out of his usual introduction. 

Whatever little cosmetic modifications they made when they were out in public, though, Sam had realized early on that it wasn’t like he and Dean were acting two different roles around each other. There were no times that Sam could point to and say, ‘That’s my brother,’ or, ‘that’s my lover.’ (Although, if he’d ever called Dean _lover_ to his face, he was quite sure that the ensuing mockery would be 100% pure _brother_.) 

But this was Jody, not some random stranger. Casting his mind back, Sam couldn’t come up with a single other person they’d known for so long who was still alive, and alongside the fact of that longevity sat the truth that he really cared about her. He wasn’t even sure when that had happened but it must have been early on, and while they didn’t exactly sit down for regular heart to hearts, over the years he’d come to trust her with pretty much all of his story, even the parts where forcing the words out felt like digging hot wires under his skin. He’d told her about growing up with their dad and without their mom, of course, but also about Stanford and Jess. He’d confided in her, after the fact obviously, about running away and trying to lose himself in Amelia, and about how ready he’d been to complete the trials and die. 

He even used to talk to her about Dean, back before...before. Though he’s long forgotten the context or the specifics of the rest of the conversation, he vividly recalls the look on her face when she told him, “You and Dean? That’s something special, don’t you think?” Of course, at that point he and Dean still had a deep, wide river of crap to wade through before coming out on the other side where he could recognize why just hearing someone else say that about the two of them made him flush hot and cold at once. He still thinks about that every now and then, wondering what exactly she’d seen to make her say that, wondering if she saw it still. 

===

“Hey, you clean up nice,” Jody says as Sam sits.

Sam huffs. “I’m gonna take that more as commentary on how crappy I looked last night than anything.”

“Take it however you want, Winchester, I was just trying to be nice.” Her voice is dry but her eyes flash amusement and he grins, flicking his hair back and preening until she cracks a smile. “Dean didn’t mind being left behind?”

“Nah,” he says automatically reaching for the menu, and the moment almost passes before he decides to grab it. “Actually, hey, Jody, about that – Dean and I don’t, we don’t lie to each other about stuff like that anymore. I mean, not even about stuff like that, inconsequential stuff, I mean. So I didn’t tell Dean anything about you having some boring research for me. Well, okay, I didn’t actually tell him anything, he’s still snoring,” he adds with a smile, trying to soothe his words so they don’t come out sounding like an accusation.

She all but gapes at him for a second but quickly recovers, following up a quick apology with a smile that’s trying hard to be genuine, but Sam can see it in her eyes that she’s trying to make up her mind about seizing a moment of her own. When she speaks, Sam isn’t sure it’s what she’d meant to say. “I’m glad to hear that, Sam, really. Things have seemed…settled between you two lately, and I…” she trails off, changes course and seems to find herself on firmer ground as she picks up again, familiar teasing note in her voice. “And you know I love Dean, I do, but first thing in the morning…? Eh, gotta say, I was kinda just hoping to catch up with you.”

Sam cracks a grin. “Well, in that case, I guess I can make an exception this once and not tell Dean that I’m your favorite.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Her eyes crinkle up. “That ship sailed long ago. Pretty sure he already knows.”

“Yeah, pretty sure he does.” Sam ducks his head, playing at bashful, but under the act a real glow is kindled in his chest and he just knows he’s got his stupid smile on his face, the one with the dimples that makes him look about twelve years old. And yeah, this is one truth he’s not in any hurry to share with Dean, because after watching the way most everyone in their life gravitated to Dean, watching him with Ellen, Bobby, Castiel, Mom, even Jack…Sam wasn’t about to deny himself the simple enjoyment of this, from the way she tilts her head for him to kiss her cheek to the way she says _Winchester_ and they all know she’s talking to him.

He peers up at her, blinks, and hasn’t even begun to parse the expression on her face when the waitress returns.

They order breakfast and slide easily into all the catching up they didn’t have time for when they rolled into town two days ago with six hours to spare before the full moon rose and the killing cycle began. Jody’s early retirement had made room on the Sioux Falls ballot for one Sherriff Hanscum, who was settling into her new role with aplomb. “She’s already way more popular than I ever was, you’d think she’d lived there all her life. Minnesota Nice is no joke.”

  
  
The deal on the old salvage yard outside of town had _finally_ gone through, after a couple years of legal rigmarole, and they’d just broken ground for the new house. “None too soon, either. You know for someone so accommodating, Donna takes up a _lot_ of room in a house! And the girls are crashing with us more and more, along with Alex’s – oh! Did you hear the news about Alex? She’s dating a _hunter_ , of all things, and they’re getting pretty serious. Yeah, one of the guys from that new crowd Claire and Kaia are running with. I halfway think she did it on purpose too, you know? Claire, I mean. It’d be just like her to keep an eye out for some hunter to set up with Alex, after all Alex’s talk about ‘living a balanced life’. He’s a nice guy, though. Lives out of his car, like most hunters, so he’s always ready to swing by for a shower and a meal. So we’ve expanded the plans for the house, it’s probably going to look like a damn hunter’s dormitory, really. We cleared out a big plot just north of where Bobby’s house used to be, and it turns out there’s enough of the foundation of the old house left to work with for an outbuilding. We’ll rebuild the panic room and on top of that, storage, arsenal, library.”

“Sounds like you’re going for a Bunker 2.0 vibe.”

Jody shrugs, chewing thoughtfully before shrugging again and nodding. “Basically, yes. Only above ground, which is very important.” She points her fork at him. “You’re going to ruin your eyes if you spend much longer researching by lamplight.”

Sam pulls a grimace. “I know. I’m working up to telling Dean we need to think about finding somewhere else to live. I’m kinda stuck on the _where_ , though. I mean, we’ve got to stick close to the bunker but Lebanon isn’t exactly anyone’s ideal place to settle down, you know?”

She chews slowly for another minute, eyes cast off to the side. Sam follows her gaze but unless she’s suddenly as enamored of pie as Dean is, he’s not sure what she’s looking at. Finally she sets her fork down and folds her hands on the table, though she’s slow to look up at him. “You remember way back at Asa’s funeral, how everyone was telling stories about other hunters, mostly those who were dead and gone but also…about you? You and Dean?”

Sam nods, chasing a piece of fruit around his place, but making no move to eat it once he’s finally got it speared, listening intently as Jody tells him about this group of young hunters Claire and Kaia have been working with, how it seems that kind of hero worship, the perpetuation of the legends of their predecessors, is just as much a part of hunter culture now as it was in the previous generation.

“They even tell stories about me, can you believe it?” Jody says, detouring for a minute to give him an exaggerated tale of her own adventures. She goes quiet after they’ve each had a good laugh, and just looks at Sam, gathering herself, and when she finally asks her question it leaves Sam wondering how he could ever have thought this was about anything else.

“Sam, is it possible that there is any truth to the rumor that you and Dean are not actually related?”

He breathes out slowly, trying to counteract the feeling of being pressed back into his seat by an accelerating force. She’s watching him, her expression careful but wide open, ready to take his next words as absolute truth.

_No. We’re not._ It would be so easy to say. One last, huge lie to let the other, huge truth out into the sunlight.

“No,” he says. “No truth at all. He’s definitely my brother.”

The way her jaw jumps, Sam wonders for a split second if she’d actually hoped he was going to lie. But then her gaze turns inward and Sam knows it’s herself she’s struggling with. He waits her out and finally she looks back at him and says, sounding halfway to apologetic, “Sam, if I don’t ask this next question, I’m just going to keep wondering about it, and that wonder is going to fester and turn into something ugly, you know what I mean?” He nods, she exhales. “Is it possible that you and Dean are…are something…more than brothers?”

The force of his mental recoil from that turn of phrase surprises him. _More than brothers._ Even before they were, in the sense that she’s asking, it’d irked him beyond reason every time something other than what he and Dean had was set up as _more than;_ privileged as _more important, more real, more fulfilling._ No, Sam had realized a solid decade ago. The answer to, ‘Don’t you want something _more than_ a life on the road with your brother’, was no. A romantic entanglement would never, in his books, be ranked above the bond he shared with his brother.

This mini rant may have flashed through his mind in the blink of an eye, but apparently that was long enough for it to read on his face. Jody’s lifted hands catch his attention and he refocuses on her, raising a hand himself to forestall her retraction. And from somewhere within that maelstrom of irritation and apology, Sam hears his own voice telling her quite calmly that yes, he and Dean are…together. Yes, in the way she means. Yes – together-together.

Even as it’s happening Sam knows he’ll never be able to reconstruct that conversation that follows. He’s too preoccupied with the feeling that his heart and his stomach are trying to crawl off in opposite directions to really look at her, but he suspects that she’s avoiding real eye contact just as assiduously. He gets the gist of her half-formed questions and answers in kind, grateful that they’re already used to talking in partial sentences anyway. No, it had happened since they met her, it’s not something they’ve been hiding all along. No, nothing ever happened between them when they were children. No, their mom never knew.

When the buzzing in his ears dies down and Sam starts to believe that they’re actually having this conversation, he finally looks up at her to find her watching him with her attentive listening face on. She looks uncomfortable, sure, but her cheeks are neither flushed with embarrassment nor white with anger, and she hasn’t run away yet.

  
  
She hasn’t run away yet.

  
  
It’s when their eyes finally meet and she gives him a reflexive smile – which, if not bright, she at least doesn’t try to check – that Sam feels something unbind in his chest. He takes in a breath, lungs finally expanding fully, and as he exhales words begin to form on his tongue.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jody. I know it’s weird, I know it’s...actually I can’t even bring myself to say it’s messed up. I know neither Dean or I are poster kids for emotional stability or anything but it’s just, the way our lives have been? This is the best thing that’s ever happened.” He lifts his shoulders in an eloquent shrug and says plainly, “I love him. He’s my brother. He’s the most important thing in the world to me and I love him so much that sometimes I don’t even know how I’m holding it all inside of me, I feel like I could just…combust. And he loves me. Jody, he…” He trails off, helpless to even attempt to put Dean’s feelings for him into words. “Anyway. It’s been a few years now and it just...it works. We work.”

He shrugs once more and drops his hands into his lap. It feels like everything is hanging in the balance, like that moment after you push all your chips onto the table, waiting to see what the cards will hold.

“You know,” she says after a minute, then looks up at him and starts again. “It’s going to take me some time to get used to, just to get used to knowing that, I guess. But also...” Her mouth twists suddenly and her eyes slide away, a light flush of color rising in her cheeks. “Saying I’m not surprised would be a lie. So would saying I suspected. But at the same time…I’ve known you boys for a long time, I’ve been watching you for a long time. And in a way, I have to admit that it doesn’t really feel like new information. Everything you told me just kind of makes sense with what I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

Sam ducks his head. “Yeah, fair enough. It’s really never been a secret, how I feel about my brother.” He lowers his voice further, not in any hurry to traumatize the nice family in the booth behind him, feeling the heat rising to his face as he goes on. “The fact that we, that we also, that I like to kiss him, that’s just, it’s just one facet of us. It’s not everything, no one thing is everything.”

“Oh.” Jody leans forward, elbows on the table. “So there is kissing involved? The way you’re blushing I thought maybe you were waiting for prom night. Please, tell me more.”

Sam lets out a short breath in a parody of a laugh, hunching his shoulders and shaking his head a few times until he thinks his face isn’t quite so red. “Jody, it’s really nice of you to be so…” he discards several words, settles on the safest one, “so nice about all of this. But you really don’t have to, I don’t think it’s written anywhere in any friendship code that you have to play it cool in the face of…something like this.”

“Sam.” She covers his hand with hers, the sudden and utterly unexpected contact making his restless fingers fall still over his half-shredded napkin. When he looks up at her, she gives a small smile. “Listen, I don’t have enough friends that I can go around throwing them away when they do something I don’t understand. Especially not the ones I really care about.”

He tries to smile. “Just...‘something you don’t understand’? Not, ‘something that freaks you out,’ ‘something that you think is wrong’?”

Her eyes flick searchingly over his face, and Sam has no idea what she might be seeing.

“It doesn’t freak me out,” she says finally, immediately giving a concessionary tilt of the head. “It makes me a little uncomfortable. But it doesn’t freak me out.” Her smile grows brighter, and she’s still resting her hand on top of his. “Given what you just said to me? Who am I to argue that anything born out of that much love _must_ be a bad thing. So yeah, tell me. How did it start, or, or whatever you want me to know, tell me; help me understand. Because Sam, if I go away only knowing that it’s happening and nothing else...trying to fill in those blanks on my own, that’s what’s going to start freaking me out. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Sam huffs, wry. “What you imagine on your own is almost always worse than what’s really going on. Believe me, I know.”

She nods, squeezes his hand, and releases him to settle back on her side of the booth. The waitress walks by to refill both their coffees, and Sam fiddles with a packet of cream while he tries to get his thoughts in order. It’s like his memories are a deck of cards that a restless pair of hands can’t stop shuffling and reshuffling.

“I don’t actually remember exactly how it started.” That’s a lie, but the memory of the first time Dean grabbed him and kissed him is one he’s keeping for himself. “It’s almost like the start isn’t that important, ‘cause we were always heading that way. I remember, even at the time, my most coherent thought was ‘Finally.’” He glances up at her, the look too swift for him to really get a read on her expression, and finally tears the top off the creamer and dumps it into his coffee.

“After everything we’d been through together...first I died, then he died like a thousand times, the Apocalypse, Hell, the Darkness...it was like...I’d got used to living in this state where I was constantly terrified of losing him. It’s not a normal way to feel about your brother — it’s not a normal way to feel about anyone.” He opens another creamer and stirs it in slowly, watching it swirl and infiltrate the murky depths. “But when I got to have him like that...well, that’s what it was, another way to have him, to hold on to him. I remember thinking that things would have to change, now. That Dean would have to understand how...how precious he is, how much I needed him to take me seriously when I said I couldn’t lose him. But, well, you know Dean, and for a while all I actually got was...”

“Self-flagellation with a side of guilt?” She offers and he looks up at the lightness of her tone, as though this was any other day and she was offering commentary on any other Winchester quirk she’d been privy to over the years. 

He crooks a smile and says, “Yeah, epically so. He could not switch off the instinct to protect me, even if it was from himself. You know how he used to be, he’d go around hooking up with any waitress who gave him her number and eating five burgers a day if he felt like it and blasting his stupid music, and thinking that made him uninhibited. But whenever he’s faced with something he wants, like _really_ wants, I don’t know. It terrifies him, I guess. I mean he’ll run into a vamp nest alone with a single machete, but to even acknowledge that he might have actual desires, _that_ terrifies him.”

  
  
“He is a doer,” Jody says with a shrug, her eyes warm. “There was always going to be a good reason for that. Go on.”

Sam nods. “When he could forget the rest of the world for a minute he’d be all right, things could be good. But back then, our mom was still around, we had a bunch of other hunters in and out of the bunker all the time, it was pretty hard to get him to let go. And then...you remember how it was, when Chuck came back, when it started to become apparent just how much our lives had been dictated by him...Dean just called it off.”

That’s another memory Sam is keeping to himself. Dean’s face, his freckles standing out stark against his rage-pale skin, eyes red-rimmed and gleaming as he drew his line in the sand. Right there beside the map table, too, because going back to have it out in one of their rooms would have been too intimate. Sam had got it even then, had known what Dean was doing, and realized that he had no cards to play in the cosmic deck that Chuck had stacked against them.

‘This was all part of his plan,’ Dean had told him, voice scraped raw. ‘To keep you and me so twisted up together, isolated and not letting anyone else in because of this flowers in the attic shit. He wanted us like this, so we gotta say no, hell no. No, Sam, it’s over.’

Sam had just nodded, chest feeling like it was collapsing, and waited until he was alone to almost break his toes against the wall, letting out a silent scream and a string of curses all aimed right at Chuck – wherever the squirrelly bastard was hiding. 

“Is that why he went off the rails so bad?” Jody asks, and Sam lookes up from a silence he hadn’t realized was stretching on. “I never really got it, why killing Chuck was so desperately important to him.”

“That’s part of it, definitely. The way Chuck would refer to us, to me and him specifically, as his ‘favorite show,’ it was hard not to ask the question...was any of it real? Anything that had ever happened to us, any decision we’d ever made, was it just to up the drama factor for this, I don’t know, this celestial peeping tom to get his rocks off?”

Jody nods a few times, then snorts softly and scratches behind her right ear, forehead wrinkling up. “Guess you had to wonder if God had been watching too much ‘Game of Thrones’ on the side, huh?”

Sam lifts his chin, stunned for a moment, then lets out a snort that quickly becomes a full-on laugh. Leaning back he drapes an arm over the back of the booth and looks up at the ceiling, chest still jumping. “Yeah. Actually. That’s, uh, not too far off the mark from something Dean said. So that happened, and then we, you know, drained Chuck. De-god-ified him. And I think we both expected that whatever we’d felt for each other would drain away too when we were no longer tuned in to his channel.”

“But it didn’t.”

“But it didn’t.” Sam echoes her soft tone, and after a moment drops his hand back to the table, meeting her gaze squarely. “The sense of freedom was unbelievable. For me, yeah, but for Dean especially. We sat there, after it was over, just having a beer like we have a million times, but, Jody...”

Sam trails off, awe at the memory inflating his chest. He didn’t let himself think about it much, afraid he’d wear the edges off if he handled it too often. But when he did, it always set a low thrum going in his belly, his fingers and toes tingling like they were waking up after being still for too long. “It was like watching a physical burden being lifted from him.” Sam shifts in his seat, sitting up taller just as he’d watched Dean do that night. “He turned...incandescent.”

‘Finally free,’ Dean had said. And then he’d reached for Sam, almost hadn’t stopped touching him from that moment on. In the car, he’d driven them out of Kansas with his arm draped over the back of the seat, fingers brushing Sam’s neck. When they stopped for the night he’d barely waited for Sam to click off his seatbelt before pulling his little brother across the seat and folding him into his arms like Sam was still smaller than him, tucking Sam against him for the warmest, longest, most tender embrace of Sam’s life. Long before Dean let him go, Sam knew beyond any doubt that they had come home.

They both start when the waitress leans in to drop the check on the table. Jody beats him to grabbing it, won’t hear a word about splitting the bill when she was the one who asked him to meet. While she’s pulling out her card Sam surreptitiously checks his phone; no message from Dean, but there’s a scramble on the menu he knows his brother would love, so he asks the waitress to put it on a separate check and box it up for him. He turns back to Jody, finds her watching him, and opens his mouth with no idea of what to say.

Jody rescues him, sort of, by asking, “Does anyone else know?”

Sam shakes his head, then shrugs. “I mean, if we’re around people who don’t know we’re – people who aren’t in the life. But, our people? No. Well. Castiel knew, and he didn’t care. Not in a moral, judgmental way, anyway.”

“Castiel.” She frankly stares. “The angel. And he didn't care?”

Sam snorts and can’t keep the old bitterness out of his voice. “If we're basing our ideas of right and wrong on what angels do or do not care about, I think we’re all screwed. But yes, he knew. We didn’t tell him, but he knew. And he told Jack.”

“Jack. New-God-Jack? _New God_ knows?”

Sam nods, amused in spite of himself at her reaction to the company she’s keeping, now that she knows too. Watching her for another handful of seconds, though, he sobers. “Are you going to tell Donna and the girls?”

She hums meditatively, biting her lips. “I’m gonna let it settle, first. But I won’t tell anyone anything without letting you know first, all right? And you? You gonna tell Dean you told me?”

Sam grimaces a little and shrugs, busying himself with pulling on his jacket, falling still when Jody reaches across the table to touch his arm. “Of course you are, because you and Dean don’t lie to each other anymore, remember?”

Sam’s lips twitch up and he murmurs, “Of course.”

The waitress tells him his to-go box will be ready in a minute so they get up and move to stand by the door while Jody digs through her pockets for her keys. Finding them, she looks up at Sam, a ready smile on her face, but whatever she sees in his expression makes her own turn thoughtful. She lifts a hand to his face, her touch gentle as his own mother’s had been a few times. And then, as comfortably teasing as Mary Winchester had only ever been with Dean, she says, “You keep frowning like that you’re going to ruin your good looks.”

He rolls his eyes, ducks away when she laughs, trying to smooth out the worry lines on his forehead.

The waitress hands over Dean’s food and they head out into the parking lot, Sam making for the sidewalk, Jody for her truck. At the last moment Sam almost calls her back, badly wanting to ask her to tell him that it’s all right, that they will see her again. She turns as though she’d heard Sam call her name, and throws him a silent salute before swinging herself up into the cab.

Back in their motel room, Sam finds Dean sitting on the bed, pulling on his socks, hair all rumpled and cute from sleeping in. Dean looks around as Sam sets the takeout bag on the table and is still blinking a little owlishly when Sam drops one knee on the bed beside Dean’s hip, kissing him and pushing his hands up under his t-shirt.

“Oh. Hey. Morning,” Dean mumbles against his mouth, pulling back to look up at him when Sam breaks away, shifts to get his other knee up on the bed so he’s fully straddling Dean’s lap. “Bringing me food, bringing me sugar…is it my birthday?” Dean’s grinning, it would be cheeky if he wasn’t still so sleep-warm and soft. Sam brushes his thumbs over his cheekbones and looks down into his eyes before he ducks his head and presses his lips carefully to Dean’s.

About once a week, his brother accuses him of being a caveman. This isn’t going to be one of those times. Dean isn’t fragile and neither is this thing between them, but it is precious. It’s precious, and it’s something Sam doesn’t ever want to get used to because getting used to it might mean taking it for granted. He’ll take Dean any way he can get him, except for granted.

He’s breathing quietly against Dean’s lips when Dean reaches up, catches his wrists and uses his hold on Sam to move him back a little. More alert now, his eyes flick between Sam’s and then he asks simply, “What’s up?”

Sam exhales through parted lips. “Jody knows.” He frees one hand to gesture in the minimal space between them. Between his heart and Dean’s.

"Jody kno—” He breaks off, blinking at Sam. “Wow. Did you tell her? Did she figure it out? Wow."

“Yeah.” Sam rubs his forehead, sitting up a little more. “She straight up asked me, caught me totally off-guard. But when I was walking back just now, thinking about it…Man, I’m kind of surprised it took her this long to catch on. But she actually...she seemed to be...okay with it? For now anyway, I don’t know, maybe she’ll go home and have second thoughts and never call us again, who knows. But...yeah. Wow.”

Dean’s shaking his head. “It’s Jody, Sam. She’s not gonna jerk you around like that.” His eyes lose focus and in a minute he shakes his head again. “Jody, man. If anyone could just take it in stride it’s her. I mean, remember how she was just Sherriff Mills, she wasn’t even _our_ Jody yet, and she still was not fazed by Bobby, and that’s saying something.” Dean grins, looks up into Sam’s face. “She can’t get mad at you, anyway. You’re her favorite boy.”

“Shut up,” Sam mutters reflexively, ducking as though he could hide from Dean when their faces are inches apart, and Dean just laughs and pulls him down.

Dean lands on his back with a quiet _Oof_ , makes his predictable grumble about Sam being six-foot-million and weighing a ton, and then he’s kissing him. His lips are soft, gentle but insistent, and he knows exactly how to get Sam’s mind to stop its restless spinning and sink into the moment. Sam’s almost there, one hand tucked up on Dean’s chest between his t-shirt and his steady-beating heart, when Dean starts to squirm under him, unfortunately not the fun kind of didn’t-think-I’d-be-getting-off-so-soon-today squirming, either.

“I hate motel beds,” Dean mutters when Sam pushes himself up on one elbow to look down at him. Dean arches up on his shoulder blades to stretch, grimacing. “My back’s killing me, man.”

Sam pushes himself up to sit, straddling Dean’s hips again. Hands resting low on Dean’s belly, he murmurs, “That sounds like a challenge. Wanna bet I can make you forget all about your back?”

“Oh, Sammy.” Dean’s head hits the pillow, his breath hitching. “You’re so good to me.”

Later, Sam wakes from a light doze to the sound of his and Dean’s phones pinging in stereo. He flails instinctively, memory returning slower than his recognition that he’s in Dean’s bed and that his whole body aches. But then Dean is swatting at the bottom of his foot.

“Move your ass, check-out’s in like ten minutes.”

Sam groans and pushes himself up on his elbows, first looking up at Dean who is fresh from the shower, pink skin glowing above the tiny white towel wrapped around his waist, then down at his own naked body. Dean’s laugh is warm and fond and he says, rambling on as he putters around the room, packing up the last of their things and pulling his clothes on piecemeal. “Dude, you were out _._ I deserve a medal for getting your brain to switch off for more than five minutes at a time. And for cleaning you up while you snoozed, like the considerate big brother that I am. Although, okay, that really was more for my benefit, we got a long drive ahead of us. I’ll go load up the car. Get dressed, all right? Meet you outside.”

Sam sits up. Dean’s departure leaves the room so empty and quiet it’s almost like he’s still there; his absence carries a weight and form so vivid it’s like seeing him in negative. Feeling a little dazed, Sam just sits there until his phone pings again and he remembers that it was the sound of a text that woke him up. Grumbling, he stumbles out of bed and swipes his phone off the nightstand, carrying it into the bathroom.

> Text from: Jody
> 
> To: Sam, Dean
> 
> I’m heading out, you boys drive safe now. And don’t be strangers, all right? We’re going to have plenty of room in the house, you better plan on swinging by whenever you can.


End file.
